The invention relates to a method for storing many types of items such as piece goods on and for automatically dispensing them from shelves in large warehouses in which a particular type of item is placed into a correspondingly sized magazine and stacked therein wherein the interior bottom surface area of the correspondingly sized magazine corresponds to the greatest external surface area of the items stacked therein, the sized magazines are placed on shelves, with the aid of remote controlled pushers items are removed from the magazines, the items needed to fill a particular requisition order are guided to a coded container, and after loading the container is automatically conveyed under computer control to a merchandise delivery station.
The invention relates further to computer controlled apparatus for carrying out this method with at least one computer controlling remotely settable ejectors for removing the piece goods from the magazines and conveyor means such as conveyor belts or containers carried on conveyor belts to which the piece goods are transferred.
The growing variety of goods offered on the markets of western industrialized nations, in particular the pharmaceutical wholesale market, which often must deliver several thousand different articles in an extremely short time, makes indispensable conveying methods for requisitioning stored goods and for preparing the goods for mailing.
The automatic removal of items from warehouses is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,881,633 in which items are stored in horizontal magazines. In order to remove the items from the magazines a slider movable via chain drives over the entire length of the magazine pushes against the stack of pieces so that the frontmost item(s) fall over the front magazine edge onto a conveyor belt running underneath the magazines. This apparatus however makes it difficult to load shelves and is extremely expensive with respect to the construction of the sliders.
In a further embodiment of the heretofore listed U.S. Pat. No. 3,881,633 a separate gripper is suggested which passes along the row of magazines, reaches into the magazines, and lifts a number of pieces over the front edge of the magazine and transfers them to conveyor means. The number of pieces is designated by a computer. The conveyor means subsequently transfers the batch belonging to the particular order into transport containers.
In DE 32 13 119 A1 a method and an apparatus for the storing and for the automatic removal of items is described in which an order to combine several different items in extremely short time can be completed without interrupting the process of restocking the magazines. Therein, the different types of items are filled into correspondingly sized magazines which on shelves are combined into blocks. Through remote-controlled delivery units the individual item types are removed from the magazines, collected when the transport container arrives at the preceding block, and subsequently placed simultaneously into a transport container when the latter arrives at that particular block. After loading, the transport container is moved further wherein the speed of the transport containers is maximized to minimize removal, collection, and loading time so that the whole process is completed in minimum time. To reduce time it is in particular suggested for the removal of several items of one type to load several magazines with the same type of item and to take one item from each of the magazines sequentially. It is also possible to carry the removed items simultaneously from several points within the block to one single collecting point with the collecting point, this point disposed preferably in the center of the block and the pieces being conveyed to the collecting point if necessary in opposite directions from the beginning and from the end of the block. This, procedure can be carried out with an arrangement in which the shelves are divided into blocks with each block having several shelf bottoms and item type magazines fastened thereon. The shelf bottoms are inclined with respect to the vertical. The item type magazines have at their lower ends delivery units which transfer the item to conveyor means. The apparatus as well as the conveyor means are controlled by a computer system. These methods or apparatuses however are oriented toward ordering of products required frequently and in large numbers of items. On the pharmaceutical wholesale market for example 40 to 50% of the sales are made with only about 2,000 products. The known apparatuses are conceived primarily for the ordering of these products. However, approximately 5,000 to 10,000 pharmaceutical products comprise approximately an additional 30% of the total pharmaceutical sales. With respect to these products pharmaceutical wholesale businesses therefore are confronted with the problem of handling the multiplicity of products with respect to storage and requisitioning. Thus, 5,000 to 10,000 item types need to be accessible at any time in as small a space as possible without the logistical expenditures becoming immense.
Known apparatuses in which each item type magazine has its own ejector are unsuitable here because of the large number of ejectors which would be required in this case.